“All right,” Steven says grandly. “You walk into a room with a kerosene lamp, a candle, and a fireplace. What do you light first?”
I watch Taylor think about it. She’s lying on the couch in my parents’ living room, her feet up in Steven’s lap. Her socks have Nordic-style reindeer prancing across the ankles. “A match,” she says finally, triumphant.
My brother frowns. “How did you know that one?”
Taylor shrugs. “Child’s play,” she says, then grins at me. “Right, Ro?”
“Right,” I agree. I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet next to the coffee table. It’s Christmas Eve, so our house is full of people: my grandparents in the dining room, my little cousins running up and down the stairs, Dean Martin crooning on the stereo about a marshmallow world. My mom’s collection of ceramic Christmas trees is clustered on the side table, their tiny colored lights winking away.
“Try this one, then, smarty,” Steven tells Taylor, and I get up and go into the kitchen before he can finish. Taylor’s mom and our mom were the only two pregnant women on our block in 1997, meaning my brother and Taylor have been best friends since they were zygotes. There’s a picture of them on the bookshelf in our family room, three years old in their bathing suits, holding hands.
Back in the kitchen, my mom is finishing the seven fishes, which is actually five fishes because she already put out shrimp cocktail and clams casino as appetizers. She is nothing if not efficient. “Do you need help?” I ask, and she looks surprised I’m offering, which makes me feel a little crummy.
“I’m set,” she says, pushing her dark bobbed hair out of her eyes with her forearm. “Go tell everybody to come sit down.”
I pass the message on in the dining room and out in the backyard, where my namesake, Auntie Rowena, is smoking a cigarette on the deck. She lets me have a drag and tells me she loves me—something everyone in my family has been doing lately, like I’ve got cancer or I’m dying, or maybe just like I’ve suddenly got a reason to doubt my own lovability. Grandma Cynthia keeps glancing at my shorn head like it’s done her harm.
I double back to the living room, where Taylor and Steven have their heads tipped close together; they’ve never dated, supposedly, although they went to every formal together freshman and sophomore year. Junior year Taylor had a real boyfriend, and it made Steven so totally unbearable that when Taylor finally dumped the guy I would have been ecstatic even if I hadn’t hated the idea of him almost as much as my brother did.
“Time for food,” I say, glancing at Taylor again. She’s wearing dark jeans and a fuzzy cardigan, her hair long and a little frizzy. In the light from the candles on the table, her skin seems to glow. All through middle school I thought I wanted to be her, look like her, and dress like her, which, as it turns out, was not what I wanted at all.
“All right,” my mom calls, carrying a giant pan full of spaghetti out into the dining room. “Everybody ready?”
Christmas Day is always kind of anticlimactic in our house, just the four of us instead of last night’s parade of one thousand family members. In the afternoon Steven goes to Taylor’s and I hang out watching a Hitchcock marathon on the classic movie channel, my mom perched like a swallow in the armchair across the living room. My dad comes in and settles beside me, the worn leather couch dipping under his weight. “You have a good Christmas?” he asks, putting a bearlike arm around me. “You like your presents?”
I nod. I did too, buttery brown leather hiking boots like Steven’s that I know my mom picked out specially, plus a sterling silver key ring with my initials engraved on it. “For car keys,” my mom explained apologetically when I opened the little box, and everyone grimaced. Three days ago I failed my road test. I couldn’t manage the parallel park.
North by Northwest is on now, which is my dad’s favorite. He’s the movie buff in our family, but my mom’s the one who got me into costuming, who taught me all about Edith Head and Irene Sharaff. I’ve always loved clothes. The two of us used to go shopping together constantly, back when I still dressed to copy Taylor. Every year on my birthday we’d take Metro North into the city and go look at the costume exhibit at the Met.
“Do you still want to go?” she asked this year, a worried-looking furrow between her eyebrows. “Even though . . . ?”
For a second I thought she meant even though I was going to be sixteen and maybe I was too old for it, but then I realized she meant “Even though you’re gay now,” like she thought that meant I wouldn’t like costumes anymore, and just like that I didn’t want to do anything with her at all. “No,” I deadpanned, “I want to go to a Giants game,” and she actually nodded earnestly before she realized I was making fun of her.
“Really, Ro,” she said, frowning, but then my birthday came and went and we had a cake and all, but neither one of us has brought up the museum since then.
“You okay, Squish?” my dad asks me now, squeezing my shoulders a little. I lean into the bulk of him, looking at the tree. I waited until my parents had been back together for almost six months before I came out last summer, and even then I was kind of afraid it was going to somehow break them up again. I told my mom first, had her parrot it back to my dad for me after I was in bed that night; afterward he came into my room and turned on the desk light, crouched down next to my bed. “I wish you’d told me,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry if I made you feel like you couldn’t.”
Now I tilt my head onto his shoulder, look back at the TV. “Yup,” I say, rubbing the side of my face against the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I’m good.”
Play rehearsals start again at noon on the day after Christmas, so I jam one of Steven’s hats on my head and schlep over to school through the snowdrifts. I started borrowing his clothes way before I chopped off all my hair, his big Patagonia sweatshirts and his skinny boy-band jeans, his T-shirts that were somehow always cooler than mine. We’re nearly the same height, me and Steven, all long bones and noses and hooded eyes. My mom loved it at the time, even buying me my own stash of chinos and stripy boy sweaters. “It’s adorable,” she said back then. She did the same thing when she was my age, I know from family photos, decking herself out in overalls and big seventies glasses. “It’s such a look.” She finds it less adorable now, although of course she wouldn’t say that. Instead she just frowns.
Rehearsals the day after Christmas is extreme, even for our school: Thomas Jefferson High puts on three shows a year instead of two, but only the most serious theater dweebs do the middle one because it goes up in January, which means coming in over break. I’ve never cared. My best friend, Danielle, goes to Pompano Beach every Christmas to visit her grandma, so it’s not like I’d be doing much anyway. This year she tried to convince me to come with her, like she was especially worried about leaving me on my own.
By the time I get to school I’m sweating inside my puffy coat, but my hands and feet are frozen. I yank off my gloves with my teeth and dig my keys out of my backpack. Normally juniors don’t get a key to the costume shop, but there were no rising seniors last year, and so Mrs. Royce gave it to me. This year’s January show is Once Upon a Mattress; I can hear Donnie O’Neal singing in the auditorium about how he’s in love with a girl named Fred.
Mariette Chen is waiting in the hallway outside the locked costume shop, sitting on the linoleum floor with her ankles crossed in front of her. “Hi, Ro,” she says, getting to her feet. Her hair hangs long and black and straight past her shoulders. She’s wearing leggings and boots that go up to her knees, like a Triple Crown jockey or one of the girls from the Pony Pals.
“Hey,” I tell her, and smile. I always feel a little embarrassed in front of Mariette. Last year at the cast party for The Glass Menagerie we kissed a little, and after that she sent me a Facebook message wanting to know if I wanted to hang out, which I never answered because I am a piece of trash and also that was the same time Taylor broke up with her boyfriend and was over at our house every day for a week.
“How was Christmas?” Mariette asks as I let us inside and flick on the lights. The costume shop is tiny, just two dinosaur sewing machines left over from home ec in the nineties and piles of whatever mismatched fabric Mrs. Royce can get on clearance at the craft store. A lot of times all we do in here is modify weird dresses or whatever that come from Forever 21 to try and make them look like they’re from colonial times or the Wild West, but every once in a while I get to make something really cool.
“It was good,” I tell her. “How was yours?”
Mariette smiles like she wasn’t expecting me to return the question, which makes me feel like a jerk. I like her, is the thing. I wouldn’t have kissed her if I didn’t. She’s just not—
Anyway.
“It was nice,” Mariette says, launching into a play-by-play of the fight her aunts all had over a Lord & Taylor gift card, and just like that, it isn’t awkward anymore. We hang out in the costume shop for the rest of the afternoon, sewing underskirts for the ladies-in-waiting, passing the measuring tape back and forth. I show her how to use the serger. After a while we dig the ancient school-issue boom box out from under a pile of cardboard crowns, but the only station coming through is local Lite FM. “Who listens to this stuff?” Mariette asks, laughing in disgust after the second Celine Dion song comes on.
“My mom,” I say, even though it isn’t true. In reality she likes the Talking Heads and Patti Smith and Joy Division, has flawless post-punk taste.
But Mariette smiles at that, shakes her head a little ruefully. “Yeah,” she says. “Mine too.”
“Come on,” Taylor says later that night, appearing in the doorway of my bedroom and curling her delicate fingers around the jamb. I’m at my desk, supposedly writing an essay about social reformation movements in the 1850s but actually doodling trim designs for the edges of the queen’s red velvet gown in the margin of my notebook. “We’re going to Carvel.”
My heart stutters in the second before I recover, before I realize that of course she means my brother is coming too. “It’s actively snowing,” I point out, nodding at the window above my bed.
Taylor shrugs. “All the more reason to get milk shakes,” she tells me, coming into the room and peering over my shoulder. “That’s pretty,” she says, pointing at the trim design with one gold-painted fingernail.
“Yeah?” I ask too earnestly, looking up at her. Her tangle of hair brushes my cheek.
“Mm-hmm.” Taylor tips her head and smiles at me, all lip balm and one crooked incisor; then, like we both realize at once how close our faces suddenly are, she straightens up, and I look back at the computer.
“Milk shakes,” I say too loudly, immediately worried I’ve freaked her out somehow. I click save on the computer and push my chair back. “Let’s do it.”
Taylor’s car is a ten-year-old Jetta that smells a little like Play-Doh but mostly like the sprigs of dried lavender that dangle from the rearview mirror. “Who was sitting up here?” Steven asks as we climb inside, adjusting the passenger seat to make room for his long, spindly teenage-boy legs. He’s wearing the hat I borrowed earlier and of course it looks better on him, cooler in some ineffable Steven-ish way.
Taylor rolls her eyes. “What are you, my dad?”
“No,” he defends himself, still fussing. “I just take my seat very seriously.”
“Oh, we know that about you,” Taylor says as I slide wordlessly into the back.
“Okay,” she continues, switching to her riddle voice now and curling one hand around Steven’s headrest as she backs out of the driveway. “Paul is six feet tall, works as a butcher’s assistant, and wears size nine shoes. What does he weigh?”
“Meat,” I say without thinking.
Taylor grins at me over her shoulder. “Nice, Ro.”
“She’s a ringer,” Steven agrees. I slump down in my seat all the way into town.
It’s strangely warm inside Carvel, considering it’s an ice-cream shop in December, and we peel off our layers immediately, shedding scarves and gloves like molting lizards. Steven pulls his arms out of his unzipped parka and hangs it off his head by its hood like a little kid as he tries to convince Taylor that they should buy a Fudgie the Whale cake. The air smells like vanilla sugar. “See?” Taylor says, waving me off when I try to hand her money. “Carvel is always a good idea.”
She swings her arm around me as we head back out into the parking lot, a chocolate milk shake heavy in my hand. My whole body prickles through four different layers of wool, everything hot and cold at once.
“You hanging in?” she asks, and I nod. I made Steven tell her for me after I came out to my family, not that he would have kept it a secret from her either way. She hugged me for an extra-long time the next time she saw me, and we haven’t said a word about it since.
I’m not sick, I think about telling her. I’m just gay.
“You guys hanging out here tonight?” I ask instead, as we’re driving back to my parents’. I’m working hard not to sound like I care one way or the other, but still I’m hit with a stab of disappointment when Steven shakes his head.
“Nah,” he says. “Gonna head over to Henry’s and watch a movie—which is why,” he tells Taylor, “we should have gotten a Fudgie the Whale. We would have been fucking heroes.” Then, over his shoulder, “You’re on your own, Squish.”
“Ro could come,” Taylor points out, glancing at me in the mirror. “Why don’t you come?”
Because that would be pathetic, mostly. “Nah, I’m good,” I say, too brightly. I wish Danielle was back from the beach. “Thanks, though.”
Back on our street, the Hudson kids three doors down are having a snowball fight by porch light, yesterday’s snowman slouching drunkenly to the side. “Night, Ro,” Taylor says as I’m climbing out of the backseat, her fingertips catching the edge of my sleeve as she waves over her shoulder. I watch the car until the taillights disappear.
Later that night I’m watching a makeover show on the couch when there’s a clatter in the kitchen. For a second I think it’s thieves or murderers, but in reality it’s only Steven and Taylor—Taylor dragging Steven, actually, him stumbling with his arm slung over her shoulder. Taylor looks colossally annoyed. “What happened?” I ask, setting down my late-night bowl of Lucky Charms on the coffee table.
Taylor grimaces. “Like four shots of Jäger.”
“Gross.”
“Pretty much.” She sighs. “Are your parents home?”
I shake my head; Taylor nods grimly. She juggles Steven’s limbs for a second, navigating him around the side table to get to the staircase. She only comes up to his shoulder.
“What has an eye but can’t see?” he slurs cheerfully.
“A needle, Steven,” I can hear Taylor saying as she drags him up the stairs. “I told you that one in second grade.”
She comes back down a few minutes later, scooping her hair out from under the collar of her jacket and twisting it into a knot on the top of her head. It’s so thick it stays without a rubber band or a pin or anything, like she keeps it like that through sheer force of will. “Fucking hell,” she says, blowing out a breath, and I laugh.
I’m expecting her to leave, but instead she plops down on the couch beside me, pulling the bowl of Lucky Charms over and picking out the last of the marshmallows. “How was your night?” she asks. She smells like cold air and beer.
“Fine,” I tell her, wishing I’d done something to make me seem like a little less of a loser. “It was mostly, you know, this.” I gesture to the TV.
“I love this show,” Taylor says, and we watch for a little while in silence. It’s the first time we’ve been alone together in what feels like forever. When I glance over, her eye makeup is migrating down her face a little, a smudge of jet-black liner just above her cheekbone. I want to reach out and rub it off with my thumb.
“That’s better,” Taylor says, when the stylist cuts off all the dumpy woman’s hair. Then she looks at me. “I like your hair like that,” she says. “Have I said that to you already?”
I smile. “Really?” It’s so short. It’s nineties boy hair, is what it is, floppy in the front like Devon Sawa and razored along my neck. I explained myself like six times to the Supercuts barber, and still he asked if I was sure. “My mom cried when I did it.”
Taylor’s eyes widen. “Did she really?”
I nod. “Not like, big theatrics or anything. But she went into the pantry for a really long time.”
“Claudia,” Taylor says, which is my mom’s name. “Come on.” She pulls one knee up onto the sofa, tucking it under her and facing me head-on. Her own hair is still up in its tieless bun, curly and witchy and magic. “Well, I think it looks great.”
I wonder for the first time if she’s drunk. “Really?” I ask, blatantly fishing now. “Not too much like Steven’s?”
Taylor laughs. “Only if Steven was really girly looking and also maybe an elf.” She plucks another few marshmallows out of the bowl, hearts and moons and rainbows, then puts her hand down on the sofa cushion, so close that for a moment our pinkies brush. She takes just long enough to pull away that for a second I let myself wonder if maybe it’s on purpose. “He told me about your road test, by the way.”
“Yeah,” I say, sinking back into the couch with my shoulders up around my ears. “It’s no big deal. I can take it again in January.”
Taylor nods. “Well, I’m an expert parallel parker, for what it’s worth. I could teach you.”
“Really?” I look at her for a moment, all apple cheeks and long, spiky eyelashes. If I kissed her, her tongue would taste like processed sugar.
“Sure,” she says, standing up quick and steady—not drunk at all, then. “Come on.”
“What, right now?” I glance down at my pajamas, a huge sweatshirt of my dad’s and flannel pants with holly berries on them. Every year, my mom gets us a pair to open up on Christmas Eve.
Taylor shrugs. “Why not?”
Why not. I give in, pulling on a pair of boots listing on their sides in the foyer, and we go out the front door and trudge around the side of the house. It’s started to snow, fat flakes sticking in Taylor’s hair. There’s only one other car parked on our street, a red Volvo down in front of the Fowlers’, and Taylor has me parallel park behind it half a dozen times, talking me through it with slow, precise instructions. She’s a good teacher, patient, not clutching her seat belt for dear life like my mom did the whole time I was learning.
“See, you got it,” she says, ignoring the fact that it took me like seven full minutes to get close to the curb. “You’re better than I was, anyway. I had to take my road test four times.”
I smile at that. “I remember.” She was a holy terror about it for weeks, functionally incapable of taking a joke, storming around our house slamming doors in a whirl of righteous indignation and hormones. My mom, a big believer in not disciplining other people’s kids, had to ask her to take it down a notch.
“Can I ask you something?” Taylor pipes up suddenly, sitting back in the passenger seat, and there is a moment in which I nod but do not breathe. “Why did we stop hanging out?”
Why did we . . . I shake my head. She’s got her face tipped toward me earnestly, waiting. “We’re hanging out right now,” I say.
“No, I know,” Taylor says, waving my words away. “But the three of us used to hang out more, didn’t we?”
“Yeah,” I say slowly. I think of pitching it like one of the riddles she and Steven are always telling: What has dark hair, bony wrists, and a miserable crush on her brother’s best friend and probable soul mate? “I guess we did.” We stopped right around the time Taylor finally passed her road test, actually, when she and Steven got old enough to start going to parties with booze and I got old enough to figure out that I didn’t want to be her.
Taylor wrinkles her nose at me a little. “Well,” she continues, pitching her voice sort of theatrically. “There’s a New Year’s Eve party at Bodhi Powers’s house. If Steven isn’t still hungover by then, we’re going to go. You should come.”
I think about that for a moment, about what it would look like. “Maybe,” I say finally.
Taylor nods like I’ve already agreed. “Good,” she says, then reaches over and taps the steering wheel. “Go one more time.”
Steven is indeed massively hungover the next morning. I take a perverse kind of pleasure in opening all his windows, freezing cold air whistling through the room and the bright morning sunlight reflecting off the snow outside. He groans and yanks a pillow over his face, throwing the other one at me blindly.
“Need to puke?” I ask, taking pity as he suddenly lurches toward the edge of the bed. “I can get the barf bowl.”
He waves me off, rubbing a hand through his messy hair. “Go downstairs and steal me a carb.”
“They’re gonna know you’re messed up,” I say, but I do it anyway, swiping a sweater off his floor as I go, gray with a red Fair Isle pattern around the cuffs.
“And stop stealing my shit!” Steven calls, but I’m already pulling it over my head.
Downstairs, I select a banana and an English muffin, shoving it in the toaster oven as my mom wafts through the door with the morning paper. She’s probably been up for hours, running on the treadmill or sorting through the mail. Just the fact of her feels like a rebuke. “Hi there,” she says, cupping the back of my prickly head and tilting it down to kiss my forehead. “Did you leave a bowl of cereal out overnight?”
Steven got drunk. “Sorry.”
“It left a ring on the coffee table,” my mom adds. Then: “Is that Steven’s shirt?”
“Sorry,” I hiss, shrugging out of her hold as the toaster oven dings. Sorry sorry sorry. I slam the muffin onto a plate and slather both halves with peanut butter and the fancy jam my dad always buys. It disappeared from the fridge the whole seven months my parents were separated last year, even though they were switching off who was living with us at the house. It was like my dad didn’t think it was his place to buy any more. Suddenly I’m mad about that too. Suddenly I’m so mad about all of it.
My mom purses her lips. “Attitude,” she says mildly, and leaves me to my fuming.
Upstairs, I plunk the plate down on Steven’s desk with a bang. “I’m not lying to them if you puke and they ask me what’s up,” I warn, kicking at one of his socked feet.
Steven lifts the pillow off his face, looking supremely unconcerned. “What are they gonna do, ground me?”
He’s right, they definitely won’t. In eight months he’s going off to Columbia and our mom is quietly, desperately freaking out about it, like she’s feeling guilty for time lost during the separation but also, I think, like she’s afraid to be left alone with just me as her kid. And just like that I’m pissed at him too now, Steven and his self-satisfaction and his early decision and his easy life, swashbuckling his way through adolescence while the rest of us founder and drown.
“You’re not an only child, you know,” I tell him, nastily and apropos of nothing. “I know you’re the favorite or whatever, but it’s not like they’re gonna have an empty nest.”
Steven looks at me like I’m insane. “I’m not the favorite,” he says, sitting up and holding his head rather pathetically. “Mom is like, dying for you to be her friend again, you know that, right? She says it to me all the time.”
I whirl on him. “She says it to you?” The idea of them talking about it just enrages me more, Rowena and her attitude and her situation. “What does she say?”
Steven shrugs, preternaturally calm in a way that makes me want to deck him. “I don’t know, just what I said. That she misses you and wants you to like her again.”
I shrug back, irate. “She’s the parent, isn’t she?” I snap at him. “She should try liking me first.”
Steven opens his mouth, then reaches for the glass of water instead. I guess there isn’t anything to say.
Steven doesn’t emerge from his room until past noon, shambling downstairs still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Subtle, Steven, I think, but true to form, my parents don’t seem to notice or care. We spend the day as a family, eating Christmas leftovers and doing a giant puzzle of the Lone Cypress. I sit at the kitchen table and put the finishing touches on the queen’s dress and train for Once Upon a Mattress, feeling like a spotlight is on me when my mom leans over my shoulder to watch. Gay girl still likes clothes, news at eleven.
Still: “That’s beautiful, Ro,” she says quietly, touching the back of my neck with one cool hand, and I have to take a big gulp of orange juice to swallow down the weird lump in my throat.
The next day I hike back out to Thomas Jefferson to sew up the design with Mariette Chen and another junior named Sarah Murray. “I love your style, Rowena,” Sarah says when I slough off my coat to reveal my big striped rugby shirt, which is how I know she doesn’t love it at all. “And your hair. I could never pull it off.”
“Thanks,” I say awkwardly, just as Mariette says, “That’s dumb.”
We both look at her.
“Well, it is,” she says, shrugging. “No one ever says that about boys, you know? That they can’t pull off short hair. They all just do.”
For the first time in my breathing life, I badly want to kiss someone who is not Taylor Lavoie.
Steven picks me up at five o’clock, stomping through the linoleum hallways in his Converse and puffer coat to fetch me when I miss his text. Already he looks too old for this place. “Taylor says you gotta come to the party on Saturday,” he tells me, instead of hello. Sarah Murray is already giving him the eyeball, my pretty, dumb brother who never has to try.
I snap a thread between my teeth, standing up and looking around for my coat. “Taylor says a lot of things,” I tell him once I’ve waved good-bye to the others, following him back down the hallway. “Probably she just wants someone to help carry you home when you pass out.”
Steven flings himself elegantly against the push bar on the exit door. “I think she values you for more than your upper-body strength, Squish,” he says mildly, and for the billionth time I wonder if he knows how I feel about Taylor, the same way I know how he does. But that would mean Taylor knows too, so I stop wondering. “Just ask Mom and Dad, okay?”
I do; it doesn’t go well. “I don’t know, Ro,” my mom says, frowning. She’s shredding up lettuce for a salad, lighter fare after two days of Christmas leftovers.
“Steven is going.”
“Steven is eighteen years old.”
“Steven is seventeen and a half.” I feel hot all up and down my spine. The truth is, I was half-hoping she would do this—an easy out, political cover, “Sorry, Taylor, but my mom said no.” But now that she actually has, I’m furious.
“Aw, Claud, let her go,” my dad calls from the living room. It should be nice to have backup, but instead I wish he hadn’t said anything it all; it still freaks me out when my parents present less than a united front on anything, even dinner reservations or what to watch on TV. It reminds me of right before the separation, of being caught in the middle: pick a side.
“No, it’s fine,” I hear myself say, high and brittle like a wheeze. “I won’t go. I mean, at least if I’m here, you can make sure I’m not kissing a girl at midnight, right?”
My mom opens her mouth. “Ro.”
“No, no, seriously,” I say. “This works out for everyone. It’s perfect.” My voice cracks on the last word, and I hightail it out of the kitchen before I start sobbing.
I stomp upstairs to my bedroom, slamming the door so hard that my rehearsal schedule flutters down off the bulletin board. I don’t bother to pick it up. After a few minutes my dad knocks on the door, pokes his head in.
“Quite the performance,” he says. “You should be onstage instead of in the costume room.”
I don’t bite. “She hates me,” I say to the ceiling. “She hates that I’m gay.”
“That’s not true,” my dad says immediately. “Hey, uh-uh. She would run into a burning building for you, you know that.”
“Do I?” I shoot back sulkily.
My dad fixes me with a Look. “Yes, Rowena,” he says. “I think you do.” Then he sighs. “Teenage girls are supposed to hate their mothers,” he tells me after a moment. “Isn’t that a thing?”
I snort, but it makes me smile. “Did you read that in a parenting book?” I ask.
My dad rolls his eyes. “Anyway, she said to say you can go to the party,” he tells me, patting me on the shoulder. “If you want.”
I sigh, look out the window at the pine trees. “Yeah,” I tell him. “I want.”
New Year’s Eve, my mom orders a bunch of Chinese food for everybody, all of us camped out in front of the dried-out tree in the living room to eat and an old Law & Order on in the background. “Any word from Barnard?” my dad asks Taylor, while a couple of trench-coated detectives peer down at a mutilated body in Central Park.
“Leave her alone,” my mom and I say at the same time, then stare at each other, surprised.
“It’s okay,” Taylor says, but she smiles at me like thanks. I feel a pleased red flush creep up my neck.
“She’s a shoo-in,” Steven says. “Probably didn’t even need to fill out the application.”
Taylor shakes her head. “We’ll see,” she says softly, but there’s something about her tone that makes me think she knows Steven’s right. The two of them are sitting side by side on the floor with their ankles crossed; without taking her eyes off the screen, Taylor reaches over and steals a forkful of lo mein out of Steven’s bowl.
I look across the room at them for a moment. Then I look back at the TV. Finally I pick up my phone and scroll through until I find Mariette’s number, press the button for a new text. Hey, I type, thumb moving quickly across the keypad before I can chicken out. You wanna come to a New Year’s party with me tonight?
Thirty seconds later, my phone vibrates on the arm of the sofa. Sure, Mariette says, and I grin at the screen.
When I look up, Taylor is watching me, quizzical. “What?” she mouths, tapping the tines of her fork against her bottom lip. When I shake my head, holding up the phone kind of sheepishly, she only shrugs.
“I’m going to run home, change my clothes before we go,” she announces suddenly, scrambling up off the carpet. “I’ll pick you kids up in a few.”
When I come downstairs later that night, my mom is lying on the couch with a library book, a balsam-scented candle flickering on the coffee table beside her. It’s strange to see her in repose like that—when I think of her she’s always doing something, sliding earrings in on her way out the door or scrubbing hard at a day-old coffee stain on the kitchen counter. It occurs to me that maybe I haven’t really looked at her in a while.
“You look nice,” she says, sitting up and marking her place with her index finger.
“Thanks.” I’m wearing Steven’s jeans and the boots she got me for Christmas; I glance down at them, then back at her. “I really do like these a lot.”
“I’m glad,” she says, and she sounds very careful. It’s me, I want to tell her. Come on, it’s just me. “Well,” she says finally, lifting her book a couple of inches and dropping it back into her lap again. “Have fun tonight, okay? Be good.”
“Yup,” I tell her. “I will. Hey, Mom,” I blurt, before I can think better of it. “Do you maybe want to go to the museum one day before school starts?”
Her eyes widen; she sets the book back down in her lap. “I’d love that,” she tells me, sounding almost heartbreakingly eager. Her smile takes up the whole bottom half of her face. “I—yeah, Ro. I’d love that. Just say the word.”
The party is a rager out in one of the golf course developments, where the houses are built to look like they’re part of a quaint English village and the streets are named after characters from Robin Hood. I ditch my coat on Bodhi Powers’s little sister’s bed before going looking for Mariette. At first I think maybe she didn’t come after all, but after I do a couple of laps I find her standing by the fire pit in the backyard, where a scrum of football players is feeding supermarket firewood into the flames.
“Hey,” I say, bumping her gently on the shoulder. “What are you doing out here?”
“Kind of hiding?” Mariette confesses. She’s wearing a red wool cap pulled down over her ears, cheeks gone pink in the cold. It’s not a bad look. “I don’t actually know anybody.”
“You know me,” I point out, and Mariette smiles. Back inside the house, we get beers and sit at the top of the basement steps, looking down at a vacuum cleaner and an overflowing Rubbermaid bin full of half-naked Barbies. Mariette is easy to talk to, about the show but also about how much we don’t want school to start again and the last season of Sherlock; we wind up playing slaps for like twenty minutes, both of us laughing so hard at one point that Mariette almost falls down the stairs. It’s a relief, chatting with a girl I’m not blindingly, unrequitedly in love with. I’m not worried about impressing her, so I can stop thinking about what I’m doing every second and just be normal. I wonder for a moment if this is how my brother and Taylor feel when they’re together, if it can be like this when the feeling’s mutual, and after that I try to push Taylor out of my mind once and for all.
“I’m sorry about last year,” I tell Mariette suddenly. It feels important to say it before we go any further. “After the party and everything. I was a jerk.”
“Oh,” Mariette says, coloring a little. “No, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” I say, taking a deep breath and putting my hand down on top of hers. “Can I maybe get a do-over?”
Mariette bites her lip then, gently pulls her hand away. “Rowena,” she says, “I have a girlfriend.”
I blink for a second. Absurdly, I almost laugh. “You do?”
“Yeah,” Mariette says, shrugging. “She goes to Edgemont. She’s skiing with her family over break.”
“Oh,” I say. I can feel my blush spilling everywhere, from my ears to the webs between my fingers, the creases behind my knees. “Oh, okay. That’s totally cool. Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” Mariette is saying, but now my throat is getting tight and weird anyway, which is ridiculous because I don’t even want to date her, not really. I’m just embarrassed. I just feel so lonely. I feel like everyone on earth is paired up with somebody but me.
“I should probably go,” Mariette tells me, pulling off her hat and then putting it back on her head again, her hair going a little staticky with the motion.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say, even though both of us are already standing somehow, like both of our bodies are propelling us out of this encounter as quickly as possible. “It’s almost midnight.”
“That’s okay,” Mariette says. “My mom was a weirdo about me coming anyway, she thought people were going to like, drive drunk inside the house. I’ll see you at the shop, though?”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice fake and bright as the light-up Santa on Bodhi Powers’s lawn. “Definitely.”
Once Mariette is gone, I make my way through the empty kitchen, where the table is littered with tipped-over plastic cups and capless liquor bottles, something sticky and congealed pooling under a place mat. The refrigerator is papered with Christmas cards, smiling families with their arms around one another on vacations in Montauk and Vail. The clock on the stove says it’s six minutes to midnight. There’s no reason to feel like I’m going to cry.
Some guys from the cross-country team brought fireworks to set off after the countdown, and everyone is heading out to the fire pit to watch. I edge my way along the floral runner in the hallway, past a couple of kids from my lit class kissing by the bathroom door. I retrieve my coat from the pile on Bodhi’s sister’s bed, winding my thick wool scarf around my neck; other people are doing the same, bundling up for the show, and no one says a word to me. I don’t even look out of place until I start heading toward the front door. Taylor and Steven are still playing chandeliers in the living room, too cool for sixteen-shot roman candles. I dart across the archway with my head down, but I’m not quite quick enough.
“You leaving?” Taylor calls, and like five people look over. I nod and give her a thumbs-up, don’t worry about it, but she catches me in the front hall. “Where are you going?”
“No place,” I say stupidly, then amend. “I mean, home.”
“You are?” Taylor frowns. “Why, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I tell her. “Just had enough.”
“Well, you can’t walk,” Taylor points out. “It’s way too far. You want me to drive you?”
“No thanks,” I say too forcefully, yanking the front door open, but she follows me out onto the lawn anyway. She’s wearing a party dress, black and sleeveless with a full skirt and golden elephants marching along all over it. It should look like something for little kids, but on Taylor it doesn’t. On Taylor it looks like she knows something the rest of us don’t.
“Aren’t you cold?” I ask even as I’m heading for the sidewalk. It is too far to walk, Taylor’s right about that, but now I’m in this and I feel like I can’t admit that. It occurs to me too late that I don’t really have a plan.
Taylor knows it too. “Yeah, I’m freezing, Rowena,” she tells me, sounding vaguely impatient.
“So then why are you out here?” I snap. “Go inside.”
Taylor puts her hands on her hips like somebody’s sitcom mom. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”
That’s too much. The last thing I want is for her to feel sorry for me, to be some little kid who tagged along and now needs tending. “Can you please stop trying to big sister me?” I ask snottily. “I know you’re probably going to marry my brother and everything, but can you just—you’re not—”
Taylor laughs out loud, an open-throated cackle. “Marry your brother?” she asks. “Do people still think that? I didn’t think anybody thought that since we were in, like, fourth grade.” Then her face abruptly falls. “I’m not trying to big sister you. That is . . . yeah. Rowena. That is, like, the opposite of what I’m trying to do here.”
Something about the way she says it, the expression on her face, stops me. “What are you trying to do, then?” I ask her, and it comes out a lot quieter than I mean.
Taylor looks at me like I’m being thick on purpose. “Rowena,” she says after a too-long pause, jamming her hands in the pockets of her elephant dress. “Come on.”
“You come on,” I say stupidly, my heart thrumming at the back of my mouth. If I am misreading this, it’s so much worse than Mariette. If I am misreading this, I might actually die right here on this lawn in the golf course development. “You never said—”
“You never said!” Taylor retorts, and I’m taken aback by how hurt she suddenly sounds. “I had to find out in the first place from your brother. If you wanted me to know, then—”
“Of course I wanted you to know,” I blurt. “You’re like, the one person who I really wanted to know, I just—”
“Okay. Okay.” Taylor is taking a step closer to me now, reaching for my wrist where it’s poking out of my coat. Her fingertips are very chilly. I smell dried lavender and snow. Inside the house I can hear people counting down to midnight, that rhythmic chant; Taylor tips her head and I’m honest to god 80 percent sure she’s going to kiss me in the moment before the front door creaks open and Steven pokes his head out, dark hair falling into his eyes.
“What are you guys doing?” he calls. Then: “Oh.”
Taylor laughs, and we lock gazes for a moment; I don’t know whether to cry or scream. But she doesn’t look annoyed, and to my surprise I find that I’m not, either. Whatever just happened here feels like a to-be-continued, a comma instead of a period. It feels like being suspended in the best part of a dream.
Steven looks at us for a moment, realization dawning on his face. The fireworks are going off in the backyard, more sound than light, but still somebody is definitely going to call the cops soon. I think of the riddle from Christmas Eve: first, strike a match.
“We’re getting out of here,” Taylor tells him, lacing her fingers through mine and squeezing tightly, bold and unmistakable. This is not a thing I am imagining here. “You coming?”
Steven peers back and forth between us for a moment. He looks, if this is even possible, both shocked and completely, enormously unsurprised at the situation. At the very least, he doesn’t look pissed. “Whatever,” he says slowly. “Sure.” Then he nods at me. “You want shotgun?” he asks. His voice is so, so casual.
“Sure,” I say, nodding back at him, and the three of us head for the car.